Fence Lines of the Rational Mind

Forget "that spooky feeling" and choose good clean thinking (The Heights of Weird Part 5)

“It had been a coincidence to force one to contemplate the very design of coincidence… Many a writer lives with at least one sense cocked to the possibility that some events are magical, and if so, how do you write about it?” —Norman Mailer

My second book, YUCK, about the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia, is set to come out in March 2025. You can listen to a pretty outrageous sample of the book’s audio version, which I recorded a few weeks ago at my friend Cory’s studio, by clicking here.

Reading that book aloud the other day got me thinking—surprise, surprise—about that other project, the prior failed one, the book about the nuclear meltdown. I had just finished the first draft of YUCK and was camping in Joshua Tree, California in February 2021 when it struck me that if I was ever going to get my shit together and finish that other book, the big one, the one about the meltdown at Santa Susana, there were a few issues I had to sort out first.

One of them was drinking. If I was going to find the concentration and stamina necessary to finish that project any time soon, I had to stop drinking.

The other was coincidence. It seemed to me that if I was going to sort my thinking out enough to take a clear stab at that Santa Susana book, I had to “research” coincidence.

The latter problem was something that had begun to worry me long before the drinking. In some ways it was more worrisome. My identity could easily endure admitting that a substance I reached for too regularly—every day since turning 21—had taken over too much of my life. I could admit that this material entity, a molecule, ethanol, had hijacked my writing. There was no great loss in this admission. I just had to confront the hijacker and eject him before he drove us off the cliff. But coincidence was different. I could Google alcoholism, get behind the idea that this guest was slowly derailing me, luring me off my chosen path—millions of people pull to a roadside tavern and end up letting him carry their keys for far too long.

But coincidence? I think it’s safe to say that things really aren’t going well if you find yourself suddenly Googling coincidence. In the initial post that launched this faltering series “The Heights of Weird,” I wrote that the real reason I had traveled to Stanford University to talk to Bill Gates’s climate advisor, Dr. Ken Caldeira, was to share something that I had learned, a discovery that I had made. That discovery was, as a later post made clear, a certain coincidence, and if not one fit to ‘force one to contemplate the very design of coincidence,’ at least one pretty fucking weird. Weird enough that I started writing the book China Lake.

For over 20 years, beginning in the 1950s, the US military studied cloud seeding at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a military base a few hours northeast of Los Angeles in California’s Mojave Desert. Later, the CIA and Air Force, in a now infamous and once highly classified operation known as Project Popeye, deployed NAWS China Lake’s cloud seeding system as a weather weapon during the Vietnam War.

Similarly, in a continuous attempt at creating rain, Native American shamans long before the arrival of white Europeans spent thousands of years carving bighorn sheep petroglyphs on the volcanic canyon walls that crisscross what are today the China Lake base’s vast bombing ranges. As the renowned archaeologist David Whitley has demonstrated, dozens of statements found throughout the Native American ethnography of California attest to a link between bighorn sheep, rainstorms, thunder, lightning, and rainmaking on the part of shamans.

“It is said that rain falls when a mountain sheep is killed. For this reason many sheep-dreamers thought they were rain doctors.”

Put another way, the improbable modern-day practice of cloud seeding, a technology in use today in nearly every arid country the world over, emerged out of the very same Stone Age canyons once consecrated to ritual rainmaking by Native shamans. “‘Killing a mountain sheep’”, as David Whitley writes, “was a metaphor for the acquisition and application of a particular kind of shamanistic power, weather control.”

The discovery of this coincidence, needless to say, kind of blew me away.

How had the most well-funded and significant rainmaking research operation in world history taken place—unbeknownst to the US military—at the exact same location as the most persistent and sacred rainmaking ritual site on earth, with artwork dating as far back as 16,000 years?

What did such a coincidence mean? How was it possible? How had no one noticed?

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.” —Umberto Eco

And why me?—especially after all the unpromising stops and starts I covered across my previous two posts. For the avaricious nonfiction writer accustomed to navel-gazing his way toward ever more forced epiphanies, this China Lake coincidence hidden away high in the Mojave Desert felt like a serious, powerful swerve. All of a sudden, quite unlike those Starbucks scenes populating my stillborn suburban memoir, it seemed like I had a major story on my hands.

But that story was not about coincidence.

No. I think I had the intimation even then, while I was still generally able to ignore the severity of my drinking, that I’d much rather die of cirrhosis than dive into anything as asinine as coincidence. The research for the actual book itself was difficult and improbable enough without wasting even a weekend on such a worthless rabbit hole. Further, far beyond whatever polluting fumes of positivity one might huff down there among the dark warrens of New Age woo-woo, there was also the simple fact of being seen or even suspected of sniffing around that Nag Champa scented hole.

woo-woo /ˈwo͞oˌwo͞o/ (1980s) — Used to mock beliefs associated with the likes of New Age culture. Probably in imitation of a wailing sound traditionally attributed to ghosts & humorously associated w/ mysticism, the supernatural.

A surefire way to abort your own inchoate writing career is to express an untoward interest in the ineffable. Serious writing rests in precision. If you’re going to blow a bunch of hot air, there better be a dart out front and a tangible target. It’s not enough to give your book a cover like a vintage vampire novel, all black and foreboding, the text set in a type sharp enough to bite—as Arthur Koestler chose for The Roots of Coincidence (1972), a book I’d seen on display at the Iowa City public library during Halloween season, only days after digging up that rainmaking connection. The thought of peeling it open filled me with fear. Pages upon pages of hopeful paranormal imprecision. An infinite regression into to wish-fulfilling superstition. I had enough ahead of me trying to write seriously and respectfully of Native American shamanism, its spirit helpers, trance states and vagina dentata without entertaining the cuckoo notion of Jungian synchronicity, to say nothing of Paul Kammerer’s absurd seriality (even if Albert Einstein himself had called the latter idea “interesting, and by no means absurd.”) I saw myself splayed out beneath such misty concepts, a baby lying supine and wide-eyed, bewitched by the blooming buzzing confusion twirling over its crib until, summoning not a single informative sentence, I eventually starved to death, a fate already reserved for me as a writer—But at least let me die on my feet! (Nowadays, thankfully, due to the pain of several herniated discs in my lower back, I mostly write while standing.)

“We—our primitive forebears—once regarded things as real possibilities… Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the lookout for confirmation.” —Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”

My recently acquired first-edition copy

I knew my dignity and future middling success depended first on not trying to make anything too remarkable out of that rainmaking coincidence. As some kind of ‘secular intellectual,’ I had long ago steeled myself against the lure of such secret significances. Nor was I any kind of infirm alcoholic imbecile, not yet. I had not fully replaced food with a steady diet of whisky and New Age woo. I could still put two and two together—although my calculus career climaxed around there. That was why I’d studied statistics in both high school and college; it was the easiest way to cover core and breadth requirements. And it was as a freshman at Berkeley that I first read the famous paper by Diaconis and Mosteller, “Methods for Studying Coincidences,” published by the American Statistical Association.

“We are swimming in an ocean of coincidence,” Diaconis and Mosteller write.

“They delight, confound, and amaze us. They are disturbing and annoying. Coincidences can point to new discoveries. They can alter the course of our lives… When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.”

Good luck with your research

I knew that spooky feeling I found in that coincidence of Native American shamanism and classified military research did not imply the existence of anything paranormal or supernatural. No miracle, no magic or mystery—no synchronicity, seriality, panpsychism or paradigm-imploding physics was required to account for any crazy, weird coincidence. As Diaconis and Mosteller put it in 1989:

“The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million… are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year. Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events.”

And yet, for all that good clean thinking, something strange got started with that China Lake research. Something that’s stuck to me and proven to be a far harder hitchhiker to eject than ethanol. I caught it in that glimmer of the uncanny that shone through my dying Dell laptop that horrifically hungover morning I covered in a previous post, in that wave of chills I found at the far shore of that fateful Google search, and that strange fugue that seemed to consume the afternoons as I hit upon one impossible fact after another.

It was as though something bigger than myself, my cynicism, education, my sense of right and wrong, the possible and the impossible was moving in upon my existence, advancing in from elsewhere, from outside, beyond the fence line of my rational mind, and the uncanny chord it struck as it slipped in lingered on, rattling like a strand of broken barbed wire at the back of my brain, a tapping sound particularly worrisome at night when it brought to mind that opening, the unhappy gap in the calm and measured square of level intellect.

Of course, I could and did dismiss this line of thought. Constantly. All throughout the autumn and spring of 2013 and 2014, I reminded myself there was nothing remarkable to that military/rock art coincidence. Nothing special beyond the routine operation of statistics. It was just something random to celebrate and embrace. The Law of Large Numbers had dropped a fascinating statistical freak into the lap of my nascent nonfiction writing career.

“No coincidence, no story,” so says the ancient Chinese proverb.

All I could do was grab hold of it and be grateful.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in The White Album. And if in the back of my mind that eerie feeling endured, that suspicion that maybe there was something more happening than mere random chance, that unease was entirely natural, inevitable, in fact—a minor failing without which we could not live.

“The brain is a belief engine,” the renowned skeptical author Michael Shermer writes. “We can’t help believing… Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen.” We automatically detect meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. Shermer calls this automatic cognitive action patternicity and it gives rise to agenticity, i.e. “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.” We evolved over millennia to detect such patterns, to piece together data points into stories that at times assist our survival by giving us meaning and, more fundamentally, keeping us off the menu. Bet there’s a monster behind those crackling branches and you’re wrong, not much is lost. But imagine no agent is present—no ghost or demon, boogie man or bear—and you might find yourself giving calories to a Kodiak grizzly.

But it hardly follows that all the patterns we perceive point to the presence of something meaningful, important, or real.

In fact, psychologists coined a term to capture such rampant, runaway pattern detection—apophenia. An apophany is the dark side to the desired epiphany. A person experiencing apophenia finds an excess of meaning everywhere, over-interpreting events and connections, like an over-Adderall-prescribed English major reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time; their discoveries do not offer any insight or knowledge into the nature of literature, reality, or the world’s interconnectedness. On the contrary—they’re just cracked out, or fucking crazy.

Apophenia is “a process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field,” wrote Klaus Conrad, the German psychiatrist who coined the term in 1958. Conrad is most remembered for identifying the prodromal “delusional mood” or “atmosphere.” (He knew it from experience as a former Nazi party member.) According to the National Institute for Health, in Conrad’s stage model, the atmosphere may “last for days, months, or even years. During this period, the patient experiences an increasingly oppressive tension, ‘a feeling of nonfinality’ or expectation. The individual describes that something is ‘in the air’ but is unable to say what has changed.”

“The Archangel Michael wants me to blow up California’s EDD headquarters.”

The situation in the air, of course, for Klaus Conrad’s increasingly paranoid, grandiose, and magical-thinking patients was… psychic meltdown.

“Nevertheless, the subject does not attribute the changes to his/her own state but externalizes them to some, yet to be understood process in the world… The delusions appear suddenly as an ‘aha experience’ concerning what had been perplexing… At the aha-moment, the patient is unable to shift the ‘frame of reference’ to consider the experience from any other perspective than the current one... Then, ‘everything becomes conspicuously salient…’ The universe is experienced as ‘revolving’ around the self…”

A feeling of expectation… Something in the air… A peculiar atmosphere… And then…

Aha!

Yeah. Fuck that. I’d still rather boof 14 bottles of Grey Goose then wander off into that web of diseased meaning, no matter how warm or reassuring its weave. And it was armed with a healthy fear of schizophrenia, lazy lyric essay, and a lust for evolutionary reductionism that I was able to convince myself that, regarding my coincidence, rather than feeling spooked, I was afraid of getting scooped.

“You have to swear to God you won’t tell anybody,” I’d tell people before telling them what my book was about. “I’m worried someone might steal my discovery.”

But that discovery, that coincidence—so I kept reminding myself—it was the springboard, not the core. The mere catalyst for my story. A story not concerned with coincidence per se but rather humanity’s continuous desire to assert some godly control over the weather, and now, the global climate.

And yet, still, while that coincidence was not the essence, it had to be protected.

No coincidence, no story.

“And so we build,” the writer W.G. Sebald once put it. “I hope it’s not too obtrusive,” he said in the same interview, referring to the central position of coincidence in all his weird nonfictions. “We somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. And so you meet somebody who has the same birthday—the odds are one to 365, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person, then immediately this takes on major significance. [Audience laughter.] And so we build. I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know.”

“Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.” —W.G. Sebald

Yes. It was just a coincidence. Nothing special beyond a stroke of good luck. Grab it, enjoy it, go… Be brave. Build. But my wall of measured skepticism—surprise, surprise—would often crack again. It was usually in a bar at night in Iowa City after confessing what I was constructing, that book that had me holed up all day in my tiny a-frame cabin, a termite-infested fire trap from which I’d emerge some evenings in a state of visible euphoria, an atmosphere that was often infectious and always annoying to those that encountered me. It was obvious that I was working on something.

“But how did you figure all this out?” my interlocuter would ask. “Like, how’d you even start building this thing? Was there, like, one thing you stumbled upon?”

“There had been a sign,” I would say, sounding thoroughly insane.

“A sign?”

And it was in the process of thinking through the actual origins of the book, retracing the steps that had led me to ever stumble on that coincidence that the eerie feeling would again well up within me, a cold shadow creeping over the fence line of my rational mind.

“Our ‘normal’ consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connexion.” —William James

“There was a sign.”

Which was true. There had been a sign. And before their puzzled expression of my drinking partner, whoever they happened to be that night, I’d explain that the sign hadn’t come from any god or creator. More likely a small Caltrans crew had raised it over the creosote and broken beer glass back in the 1990s, when presidential elections still felt like Coke vs. Pepsi and Friends was on TV.

“It was just a random sign.”

And I’d explain how there was never anything to suggest it might point toward some hidden, deeper design. Nothing made it inherently more interesting than any other roadside wreckage or worthless place name devoid of memory or meaning littering the long road from San Diego to Lone Pine. Yet somehow that arrow, among the many thousands pointing a plausible path to nowhere throughout 300 miles of open road, somehow it alone—from my teens and onward into my twenties, every time I drove through that desert—jabbed some subliminal scrap of significance into my skull, pushing through some secret porous boundary surviving somewhere at the back of me, so that each time I perked up, paid attention, and pondered… What?

What about that arrow pricked me so? There was no pattern to perceive. Nothing peculiar to build upon, as I’ve pointed out previously. No. Peering past the tip of that solitary arrow, there was only ever the monotony of sage and heat haze, and given the murderous aura of the ghost town dying in its vicinity—Red Mountain, population 19—the idea of actually exiting and digging into whatever lay down there beyond the bend brought to mind little more than a vision of one’s body rotting face down in a ditch. A dead end.

Red Mountain, CA

But not one made of mystery, but rather misery, methamphetamines, failed dreams. No different on its face from any other inauspicious juncture dotting the Mojave, that limitless junkyard baking forever beyond the backyard of Los Angeles; that sign just one more item of detritus slowly buckling under the desert’s baffling glare.

“Hence, I never took that turnout,” I’d tell my interlocuter, ordering another $2 Lacrosse Lager before going on to explain how strange it was, then, after ten years of procrastination before all internet search engines, that a quick grad school glance at Google completed six months prior, in the spring of 2013, confirmed my intuition.

There was, indeed, a lethal entity lurking at the end of that lonely road.

Far from a necrophiliac hermit hellbent on papering the walls of his carbarn with rolls of human skin, what was hiding beyond the arrow of that bent-up Caltrans sign was actually America’s best and brightest minds, the engineers, executives, and generals who had ordered and designed, envisioned and delivered the most destructive weapons on earth. From the dreaded Hellfire missile to the revolutionary AIM-9 Sidewinder, the world’s first operational air-to-air heatseeking missile, and the AGM-62 Walleye, the first television-guided smart bomb, built to carry a W72 nuclear warhead, not to mention the military cloud seeding applications pioneered by the elusive geophysicist, Dr. Pierre Saint Amand.

“We regard the weather as a weapon. Anything one can use to get his way is a weapon and the weather is as good a one as any.” —Dr. Pierre Saint Amand

Earlier, the base had built the fuses for the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions of people the world over had been reduced to pulp and cinders as a result of China Lake’s pioneering spirit of unhappy innovation.

Oddly enough, then, that green Caltrans sign did point toward dark designs.

Had they amounted to nothing more than smart bombs, barbed wire fences, and billions in black budget defense spending, I never would have begun to write China Lake nor launched this embarrassing blog, to say nothing of having begun a failed book project about the nuclear meltdown at Santa Susana—a book I am certainly not salvaging now as I take so long to tell you just why it won’t die and what makes it so… weird wyrd and eerily connected to China Lake, so much so it can only be called a sequel.

But it wasn’t just bombs at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.

There were big horns too. Hundreds of thousands of sheep carved in one finite isolated location across millennia. More petroglyphs here in one narrow lava canyon than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere… And it was generally around this time, back in Iowa, in the bars at night, after tabulating all the terrible improbabilities, that I’d lose my fear of being scooped and begin again to feel genuinely spooked.

Renegade Canyon (Little Petroglyph Canyon), Coso Range. Photo by Author.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live… Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself…” —Joan Didion

How had the most well-funded rainmaking research operation in world history taken place at the exact same location as the most persistent and sacred rainmaking ritual site on earth? Again, what could such a coincidence mean? How was it possible? How had no one else noticed? And why me?

How, of all the thousands of signs and towns, strip malls and historical markers one might cross paths with and plan to research maybe one day between San Diego and the eastern Sierra Nevada, how had my mind made something of this one arbitrary nonsensical road sign? If one were looking for something to write about in Southern California beyond, say, those sad suburban memoirs I kept scribbling about that time my dad dropped me off at Starbucks and never called me back and I never saw him again, one would have been at a loss to land upon such an utterly unknown treasure trove of eerie epic shit.

It didn’t make any sense.

And what was most upsetting, most frightening from the standpoint of my sanity—that coincidence gave me something almost akin to hope.

That hope, however, was not something I carried to Ken Caldeira at Stanford. It was not something I ever bothered to tell anyone directly—not even really myself. It was a bridge too far. Totally taboo. Career killing. An absurd and unseemly Nag Champa scented hole. To nowhere. A dead end. Unsexy. A heresy. It was as the critic Victoria Nelson wrote in The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2002), a book that’s been receiving renewed attention:

“The greatest taboo among serious intellectuals of the century just behind us, in fact, proved to be none of the ‘transgressions’ itemized by postmodern thinkers: It was, rather, the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.”

Maybe there was something more out there? Something beyond New Age woo-woo, the Law of Large Numbers, and the ape brain’s paranoid patternicity? Maybe, I wondered—midway through writing a book about the coming climate apocalypse—just maybe…

Maybe there was something more frightening and exciting afoot than humanity’s inexorable march toward oblivion?

Looking back now, I can see that at a certain point, unconsciously, I had assigned Stanford’s Ken Caldeira the role of final arbiter. That is why I keep coming back to the poor man across, what, three, four posts now? Caldeira was the person to consult. Ken, the brilliant Stanford atmospheric scientist. The genius who did research for Bill Gates. Ken the gatekeeper, guardian of the planet, the sole person studying solar geoengineering who seemed, to me, somehow trustworthy. He was a kind of shaman, or a medieval magus, the wizard who would look long into the crystal ball of his computer model and tell us whether or not it was safe to turn the sky white, whether we might save ourselves if we shut out the stars.

Ken would decide whether there was something weird out there, a wayward force operative in all this awful coincidence.

Ken. O Ken! How I hate having typed this nice man’s name so many times. I just added up the numbers. It pops up 69 times across these pages. It does feel a little weird, this repetition, wyrd weird in the colloquial non-Shakespearean JD-Vancian sense of the term, as in deviant, gross, “evincing abnormal interest.” And indeed, if Ken Caldeira has a Google Alert set for his name, as I do (it last pinged sometime in September 2017), he must imagine some boiling caldera of hate foaming up from the basement of some conspiracy blog staffed by a pimpled and friendless aspie with a fetish for couches and trash fires who can’t stop alliterating and relitigating the gruesome injustice of his first book’s gross sales.

I wouldn’t hold that interpretation against him.

Perhaps, as a routine precaution, he’s already forwarded my babbling acid onward to the FBI. Caldeira, if you recall, alongside Harvard’s David Keith, was one of the most death-threatened scientists on earth—at least years ago, when I was lurking all over the YouTubes, pressing the keys, punching my way to the finish line of that first book.

But I mean the man no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. Truth be told, I owe him a debt of gratitude. It was Ken, the brilliant atmospheric scientist, who saved me, I think, from that “atmosphere” that portends the dreaded onset of apophenia.

It was Ken who canceled all my untoward interest in coincidence.

Ken! O Kenneth! If anyone was simultaneously rational, materialistic, staid and sane, yet open to the supernatural, its interventions, the heretical, taboo, and transgressive, it had to be Ken Caldeira, the scientist researching how to ‘safely’ block out the sun. If ever there was a researcher in need of hope, and maybe looking for something more to learn, it had to be him.

It was Ken, after all, who had described his research as an expression of despair. That was why I trusted him—depression is dependable. “For most, researching ‘geoengineering’ is an expression of despair at the fact that others are unwilling to do the hard work of reducing emissions.”

O Kenneth!

When I went to see him, I too was facing an impasse. I had about 140 pages of writing behind me—halfway through the book I figured. I didn’t know my next move. But I had the sense that whichever way I turned, it would take me to the end.

I needed another sign, I thought. I would let Ken Caldeira decide.

If when I described that rainmaking coincidence, I saw a break in his body language, a brief pause as he scratched the arm hair behind his wristwatch, and peering off toward some pale contrail curling beyond the Berkeley hills, he muttered the word, “Weird…” I would turn toward an ending that left open a possibility of hope. Perhaps there really was something at the roots of my coincidence, something ‘interesting, and by no means absurd.’ Some agency operating in our world beyond the predictable grinding myopia of humankind’s short-term self-interest.

If on the other hand, Ken just checked the time, turned back to his salad, and went on stabbing at the kale, I would proceed straight to the finish line of what felt like a perfect ending—pen something savvy and smart, world-weary and wise, hopeless and ‘post-modern’ (that phrase no one could quite explain in college and yet would signify, somehow, one’s admission into the rarefied heights of intellectual hipdom). I would not touch anything taboo, abandon that phantom terrain, ditch the whole uncanny raft of coincidence like a wagon in the desert, food for the rats and moths and wind.

I had no expectation, obviously, of the eminent scientist declaring the definitive overthrow of the dominant, materialist paradigm. I was looking for something subtle. A sign. A scratch at the wristwatch, a faraway gaze… “Weird” was then all he had to say and I’d drive to the nearest cafe. “Weird”—that word with which we wipe away all the perverse potency of a fresh anomaly. “Weird”—when something doesn’t fit, seeps in from outside, unwanted, wayward, violating not so much what we expect as what we demand each day to keep a primal dread at bay. “Weird.”

Twinkly eyed talk of coincidence is the kind of dogshit that gets you canceled in serious academic circles. But you are allowed the one tattered old term… “Weird.”

That word was the sign. I would let Ken decide.

Ken, the brilliant Stanford atmospheric scientist. Ken would say if I was losing my way, or if this odd atmosphere I carried might signify anything more than apophenia. I awaited that Aha! moment as we crossed the Stanford campus. And everything became conspicuously salient. And as he stared ahead in thoughtful professor pose, his hands clasped behind his back, I couldn’t help thinking—as I wrote before—that he looked like a prisoner in handcuffs.

“Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” —David Foster Wallace

But Ken—captive of despair—paradoxically, he freed me. The supremely death-threatened genius, Bill Gates’s own climate advisor, he spared me my own dead end. Without him I might have been discovered lying face down in a ditch beyond the arrow of that green Caltrans sign erected when Friends was still on TV, and Twin Peaks, back before David Foster Wallace offed himself. Yes, thanks to Ken I never did investigate those dark designs. It was Ken, recall, who utterly dismissed anything remotely interesting in that rainmaking coincidence.

“Is there anything more to it than irony?” he asked me.

And for that I was grateful. In fact, it was what I wanted—why I had sought him out in the first place, assigned him, somehow, the role of final arbiter. There was simply no way such a staid and eminent scientist would consider anything so preposterous.

Things would be easy from here on out—and if you read my last post, that book sample, you saw it in action: No talk of coincidence, no gross insistence on mystery, magic, or meaning. Nothing terribly taboo beyond the topic of solar geoengineering. I could go on driving a straight road to that preordained destination: Despair. I wouldn’t have to diagnose what was wrong. I would take no risks and learn nothing other than what I already knew. And this would keep things hip and savvy and help me reach the end, pen some radical rookie acrobat act that might permit some middling literary career, and maybe something more. There was nothing else to it. No supernatural agent active on earth beyond that most miserable, arrogant, and unnatural animal, man. Hope?

“For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a large crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with cries of hate.” —Albert Camus

Perhaps there was a hope that blocking out the sun would somehow save us, at least people in rich countries, the one’s most responsible for the ruin.

I would not research coincidence.

So what happened then? How was it that in the February of 2021 I found myself making a solemn commitment, in Joshua Tree, California while thoroughly drunk—having taken a bottle of Bulleit to the brain in the wake of my beloved grandmother’s death—to abandon drinking and research something as asinine as coincidence? How had I backtracked so badly? Hadn’t I buried all that embarrassing woo-woo with the book? After so many months immersed in China Lake and plagued by that core coincidence, how had that stupid spooky feeling stolen its way back into my brain?

HINT: It was Santa Susana.

Santa Susana exhumed the pale corpse of coincidence…

“Just think, then: how many other men yesterday and today, have been possessed, or are still possessed, even to the point of death, by the demon of research?” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “On Happiness,” I943

Burro Flats Cave, Santa Susana Field Laboratory

→ READ PART 6 OF THIS SERIES